Rooted in Jesuit tradition, Loyola builds community between faiths

For Vincent DeStazio (BS ’26), a member of Loyola’s A.M.D.G. Catholic Student Organization who co-leads a Christian Life Community worship group and sings in the Emmanuel Choir, the service is especially moving. His girlfriend of a year, Laura Zoeller (BS ’25), a cantor at the chapel and a soprano in the Schola Cantorum liturgical choir, is one of seven women being confirmed into the Catholic Church in a ritual culminating with a priest anointing the foreheads of the confirmands with chrism oil.

This evening, Zoeller, who formerly identified as a Lutheran, would enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. She was joined in confirmation by three non-Christian Loyola catechumens being baptized for the first time and three students who were raised Catholic and who were receiving their First Communion after completing their sacramental initiation.

“Joy is something that can’t be faked. And just the joy that was coming off Laura’s face—really, all their faces was truly incredible,” Witherington says. “These were seven young women, who, of their own accord, discerned they wanted to become Catholic at a time when there’s a lot of distrust in institutions. And these young women said, ‘No, this is where God is calling me.’”

Only a year earlier, in spring 2024, DeStazio had made a similar choice to be confirmed into the Catholic Church after taking an Order of Christian Initiation of Adults class with Witherington. Seeing Zoeller follow a similar religious journey on a day rich with the symbolism of hope and renewal left him feeling reinvigorated in his faith.

“It’s incredible,” he said shortly after the service. “It’s been such an involved and spiritual process for her. It’s difficult because you’re trying to connect with God. And you can’t decide when that happens. And so, sometimes, you just want to pray and hear your prayers being answered.”

The deep roots of Loyola’s interfaith programs

The Easter Vigil offers a portrait of religious observance one might expect to find at a Jesuit, Catholic university. But for students like DeStazio, active in Loyola’s Campus Ministry programs, worship is just one aspect of a larger story about community solidarity, social support, identity formation, and religious pluralism lying at the heart of Loyola’s interfaith mission.

Open to all students, Campus Ministry offers affiliate groups for Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Protestant students; spiritual guidance through interfaith campus chaplains; worship and grief groups; religious retreats and pilgrimages; and opportunities to serve at Chicago-area food pantries and homeless shelters.

This year, the program, which serves 3,000 students, set aside $26,000 to renovate five dedicated prayer spaces in the Damen Student Center (there are 19 prayer spaces across Loyola’s campuses) and relaunched an interfaith dinner event that brought together students from across faiths for a kosher and halal meal and an evening of dialogue and fellowship.

“Over the past three years, we’ve been working to both affiliate in a very deep way with the different faith groups that are on campus and to provide them a space for hospitality, a space for meeting, and a space for prayer,” says Steven Betancourt, director of Campus Ministry.

From its 1870 founding as St. Ignatius College in Chicago’s Near North Side neighborhood, Loyola has made Jesuit, Catholic principles the bedrock of its mission and ethos. An 1870–1871 school catalog notes that Catholic students were “frequently and carefully instructed in their holy religion,” with “the most solicitous attention paid to the morals of all.” Students in the six-year classical course curriculum were offered classes in catechism and Christian doctrine alongside English, Greek, Latin, math, rhetoric, poetry, and philosophy. And a four-year commercial course curriculum, catering largely to Irish immigrants, offered a similarly religious focus.

Today, that Jesuit, Catholic tradition is carried on in Loyola’s mission— in part, to foster “a diverse community seeking God in all things”—and the preeminence of Ignatian values such as the righteousness of service to others and the notion of cura personalis, a Latin expression meaning “to care for the whole person.”

Yet Loyola, like many Jesuit universities, has long had to balance these ideals against a desire to welcome students of diverse faiths, according to Henry Ceffalio, an archivist at St. Ignatius College Prep, the private high school that once housed Loyola’s earliest students. The 1909 charter documenting the school’s transition to Loyola University Chicago states, “No religious test or particular religious profession shall ever be held as a requisite for admission to said University or to any institution subordinate.” And as early as 1921, Loyola, already a refuge for European immigrants, placed an advertisement in a Yiddish newspaper, presumably to attract Jewish students.

“We take our religion so seriously, but because we do, we educate all and meet people where they are. We propose, we discuss, but we don’t insist,” says Michael Murphy, the director of Loyola’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. “We ask, ‘What is God doing over there? Where might we need to meet with our imagination to cultivate faith, reason, and a more humane and just society?’”

That attitude of theological openness reflects the outlook of many Jesuit universities, which embraced religious tolerance at a time when doing so was atypical, says Michael Rizzi, the author of the 2022 book Jesuit Colleges and Universities in the United States: A History. “Most early Jesuits were immigrants who had faced religious persecution in Europe and then faced discrimination again when they came to the United States,” he explained. “They saw religious discrimination as one of the key social problems they were trying to solve as they helped immigrants gain footing in American society.”

Pope Leo XIV’s embrace of interfaith dialogue

Campus Ministry builds on that tradition, tracing its roots to Loyola’s Committee on Religious Welfare, which archival records show was in operation by 1931 and managed Mass at Madonna della Strada Chapel, student retreats, and religious guilds known as sodalities.

Now a fully staffed, programmatic component of the University, Campus Ministry finds many of its philosophical underpinnings in the Second Vatican Council, also known as Vatican II. Convened by Pope John XXII in the early 1960s, the assembly of Catholic religious leaders proved to be a watershed moment in the church’s history, resulting in the publication of Nostra aetate, a seminal 1965 text promoting religious reconciliation among Christians, Jews, and Muslims; asserting the church’s “duty to foster unity and charity among individuals”; and stressing the shared spiritual heritage of humanity, which “stem(s) from the one stock which God created to people the entire earth…and share a common destiny, namely God.”

Father Arturo Sosa, S.J., the superior general of the Society of Jesus, invoked that message in a 2022 keynote address to the Assembly of the International Association of Jesuit Universities in Boston. He urged university leaders to contest what he described as the growing risks of polarization and populism to democratic values and called on Catholics “to labor side by side with people who, led by other religious beliefs, humanitarian options, or desires to serve, join in working toward the same ends of reconciliation and justice.”

More recently, says Claire Noonan, vice president of Mission Integration at Loyola, Pope Leo XIV expressed a similar message. In his May 8 election address from the balcony of the Sistine Chapel, he emphasized bridge building and the desire for unity and peace. That same day, he sent a letter to Rabbi Noam Marans, director of interreligious affairs at the American Jewish Committee, pledging “to continue and strengthen the Church’s dialogue and cooperation with the Jewish people in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra aetate.” And in a special audience for ecumenical and interreligious delegations following the inauguration Mass, he invoked Pope Francis’s call to cultivate “interpersonal relations,” such that “the human trait of encounter was always valued.”

Today, with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict raising tensions at college campuses and international students facing increased risks of deportation, that unifying message—and the creation of safe, conversational spaces for religious students to gather—may be more important than ever.

“To fight against some of the polarizations that, unfortunately, we are seeing right now running rampant in our society, we don’t need to be afraid of what’s different,” says Witherington. “We can go out and authentically encounter people, and we’re not selling our faith short when we do that.”

That’s an outlook shared by many Campus Ministry leaders, including Omer Mozaffar, a Muslim chaplain and adjunct professor in the Departments of Theology and Modern Languages and Literatures, who teaches courses on the Quran, Islamic revivalism, sectarianism, and Sufi poetry, and provides technical guidance to Hollywood filmmakers on Muslim representations in film (the Amazon TV show Jack Ryan was largely rewritten based on his notes).

“At one level, because religion is addressing reality, it’s especially important for students to explore the entire terrain of religions in the world,” he says, noting that the histories of the Abrahamic religions are intertwined and share moral guideposts, such as a selfless orientation toward service and devotion to others. “And then, on top of that, just speaking to the polarization of the current political situation, it’s important to reach across the aisle, to learn about everybody else. And at the very least, to see each other’s humanity—and hopefully even beyond that.”

DeStazio’s experience at Loyola embodies that bridge-building ethos. An aspiring foreign-service officer with a strong command of Arabic, he didn’t intend to get involved in Loyola’s interfaith community, but after going through Witherington’s confirmation class and feeling his Catholic faith reinvigorated, his outlook changed.

Since then, he has worked as a student assistant in the Campus Ministry office and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, spoken to incoming freshmen about campus religious life, sat on an interfaith panel in a journalism class, and participated in an interfaith leader formation retreat at Loyola University Chicago’s Retreat and Ecology Campus in Woodstock, Illinois.

Perhaps most notably, he has forged lasting friendships with Jewish, Muslim, Protestant, and Hindu students, who “have played a prominent role in my discernment” and reminded him how central faith is to his identity and his role “in representing my faith to others.”

Breaking bread to build bridges

In a February interfaith dinner— the first of its kind at Loyola in 12 years—DeStazio sat down with 20 student leaders representing the five major faith groups for a vegetarian meal and a night of fellowship. Organized by Jeff Peak, assistant director of Campus Ministry, as part of a master’s course in Loyola’s Institute for Pastoral Studies, the event was designed as a galvanizing step in a broader strategy “to build deeper connections and community between the various faith groups represented on campus,” Betancourt says.

Students sat at five tables, intentionally placed so that leaders of diverse faith groups would sit together. During the meal, staff leaders prompted students with questions about childhood traditions and memories, the challenges they faced in practicing their faith on campus, and the aspects of their religious lives that inspired joy and purpose—the goal being to keep the atmosphere light and companionable and have students speak for themselves, not as representatives for entire religions.

DeStazio says the sense of community he felt was empowering, akin to the fraternal kinship he felt with Filipino migrants at the small living-room satellite congregation of St. Anthony’s Parish outside Tel Aviv, where his family lived for many years. “One thing that a lot of us realized is that our religions, different as they may be, boil down to a very similar goal, you might even say the same goal—fostering community—and we are really united in that.”

Lauren Viteri (BS ’26), the president of Hillel at Loyola, came to the dinner “petrified” and unsure of what to expect. At a time when Jews on college campuses have been the target of verbal and physical assaults, seen their dorm rooms vandalized, and experienced death threats, Viteri, an actress who has appeared in the television shows Chicago Fire and Work in Progress, says that presenting herself to non-Jewish students required enormous courage.

“But I was so surprised that when I sat at my table, everyone was so nice and welcoming, and I guess my fears just disappeared because everyone was so respectful,” she said. “I really appreciated how everyone listened. I’m used to people almost ignoring the Jewish experience or discrediting it. So I was very pleasantly surprised.”

Or as Aastha Nirmal (BS ’26), the vice president of the Hindu Students Organization, put it, “I kind of saw that we’re all kind of the same person. At the end of the day, we believe in the same things, and we love to get to know each other more.”

Another student attending the dinner was Haaris Malik (BS ’25), a political science alumnus who developed a close relationship with DeStazio in an Arabic 104 class, where the two performed a skit together—the reenactment of a dinner date—for their final project. Their relationship has deepened as they have crossed paths at interfaith leadership events. Shortly before spring break, they had a long conversation about the role of Pope Francis in the Catholic Church, which Malik, who has worked on bills in the Illinois House of Representatives as a policy intern at the Muslim Civic Coalition, found deeply revealing.

“I never understood his significance, how he can dictate precedents for what the Church is supposed to do and how it is supposed to act and behave,” Malik says. “I found that interesting, having someone who can speak to contemporary issues and be a voice of leadership.”

After Malik joined the Muslim Students Association (MSA) as a sophomore, Mozaffar encouraged him to become more involved in interfaith programming. This past year, as the prayer coordinator for the MSA, Malik organized Friday afternoon group prayers for Muslim students, which he says have helped students cope with grief and provided a sense of safety and solidarity at a time when many students have struggled to cope with Israeli bombings in Gaza. “Having people to talk to means so much,” Malik says.

A chaplain and so much more

As one of roughly 50 Muslim chaplains at colleges across the country, Mozaffar has been another source of solace for Muslim students. In addition to providing spiritual guidance, he has counseled international students deeply fearful of their legal status and consoled or referred to caseworkers at Loyola’s Wellness Center students whose families have been affected by conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, and Ukraine, or who are struggling with anger management, anxiety, and depression. (About 25 percent of students Mozaffar sees are nonMuslim, but Muslims also visit his office to receive pastoral care).

“The core message is that the divine is not going to abandon you,” Mozaffar says of his chaplaincy. “If part of the world’s design is to be a wilderness, the purpose of religion is to help navigate all those vicissitudes, all the peaks and valleys that are in this world.”

One way, he says, is through religion. “And the nice thing about being at a Jesuit institution,” he added, “is that we take this very seriously. Other schools tend to be dismissive about religion. At Loyola, it is a very real thing.”

On an April evening, about 20 Muslim students, all barefoot and many wearing hijabs, gathered in the recently renovated women’s musalla. The small, window-lit room contains prayer rugs, pillows, a bookshelf stocked with copies of the Quran, and a private wash basin where students can perform ritual absolution, washing their hands, arms, face, head, and feet before praying. Striping in the room’s carpet points toward the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, the holy site Muslims face to pray, and students have access to the space 24 hours a day.

One of several dedicated prayer spaces on a second-level corridor of Damen Student Center, known as the Hall of Faith, the musalla is accessible to all students and provides a space for students to pray, study, meditate, or simply talk quietly with friends.

Nearby is a Manresa room for Christian students (named after the Spanish city considered the cradle of the Jesuit order); a Hillel room with a kosher kitchen for Jewish students; and a puja room decorated with photographs and figurines of Hindu deities and garlands called malas.

Seated on the floor of the musalla, Rehonoma Jahin (BS ’25), who grew up in Bangladesh, was talking with a group of her friends who had just finished praying. It was one of five prayers the Muslim computer science graduate performs daily as an act of submission and worship to God.

When Jahin arrived at Loyola in 2021, she was eager to explore American culture but apprehensive about attending a Catholic school, where, she worried, she would find limited opportunities to befriend Muslim students. On joining the MSA and discovering the musalla, her fears bated. “I found a family here, so I wasn’t lonely,” she said.

Last year, a student-led, antidiscrimination uprising in Bangladesh known as the July Revolution claimed the lives of several of Jahin’s friends. Feeling devasted and powerless to help after returning from a December 2024 trip to the country, she went to Mozaffar for guidance. “As long as you support your friends wherever you are, as long as you are there for them, praying to God for them, you are doing your best. Even if you do a small thing, everything matters,” he told her.

It was a comforting message, Jahin says, a reassuring statement of hope that spoke not only to her Muslim faith but also to a more universal truth: “At the end of the day, every religion is saying the same thing: peace.”